Thinking about the way change moves us

Defining Digital… another contribution

Matt Jukes (@jukesie) wrote a great blog post on the meaning of ‘digital’ which led to a bit of conversation on Twitter this morning between Phil Rumens (@PhilRumens), Matt and me – but 140 characters isn’t enough space to share the definition of Digital that we’ve used inside Bristol City Council, so I thought I’d better blog about it instead.

As we began to build our local digital approach in the council we explained what digital meant thus:

“Digital means services that are designed from the ground up to be discovered, requested, processed and delivered using technologies enabled by the Internet, by mobile devices, by wireless networks, within a context of consumer use of these technologies and social networks. Digital implies end-to-end, not just an electronic front-end and a manual back-office. Digital implies a relentless focus on user needs, over service silos organised around the traditional hierarchies of government structures.”

So there you go, not necessarily the shortest or only definition you might need, but it’s helped us to be clear about the various dimensions involved in a digital approach to service transformation and why it’s genuinely different from things we’ve done before as a council and as a sector.